My Green Toe: Preparing the Garden Bed

"Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another."~Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977

Now that June has snuck up on us, and we have a few moments--thanks to a few open "Personal Day" off from work, I reckon it's time once again for Anne and I to "see" how our garden might grow this Summer. It seems that this year (unlike last when we turned over the soil and compost pit much earlier in the growing season), Anne and I will have begun prepping the ground in the early Summer as opposed to late Spring. This was a conscious decision on our part, as last year everything reached fruition very early and (as often seems the case) we planted too much for the space we have set aside for planting edibles. It's sort of an ongoing learning experience, especially for moi, who functions more as a laborer to Anne's gardener... which suits me just fine, thank you!

Stage 1: The "garden" as it has been growing since the ground thawed in late April. Columbine, patches of grass, dandelions...


Stage 2: After hand pulling the largest of the weeds (and vines which grew through the wooden fence running along the garden bed), I used a gas-powered roto-tiller we borrowed from my father-in-law to further extract weeds and turn over the soil.


Stage 3: My wife and stepson "shoveled" some good mulch from our composting pit, digging deep below after removing the top few layers. These top layers would later be returned to the pit to become next year's bottom layer.

Stage 4: I then spr4ead out the mulch form the composting pit over the exposed turned-over soil. Roto-tilling the ground again to mix-up the existing ground with the mulch also gave me the opportunity to assist further Mother Nature by crushing some un-decomposed eggshells and grass and return nutrients to the dirt.



The bed is ready to roll, so now the most important thing to do next is to select which "crops" we will be planting this year, and making some good choices so as to not over plant the area, something which invariably seems to take place...
Breathe in, breathe out... YOU AND I ARE ALIVE!